Pickup
by TheLuciferPerson
Summary: Gokudera and Yamamoto, in their late 20's, feel the blazing days of their youth slipping away, and are forced into the pickup culture to avoid being alone. As awkward and new to the dating game as they are, will they find any success by their 30's?
1. The Club District

**Hello dear reader. This is the writer, TheLuciferPerson. Thank you for clicking on my story.**

**This is the 1st chapter of what will be a multi-chapter story in the Realism genre. It starts in a club district...**

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Any person who has ever worked in the catering service industry knows that there are rush hour periods.

Depending on the establishment, the frame of the rush hours differ. Restaurants have the breakfast or brunch peak and the crush of lunch and dinner. Cafes have much the same, except that their hours come a little on the fringes of the restaurant times. Bars take the late hours, mostly, though it depends on the bar. In big cities, there is no end of such service industries. The streets flicker endlessly with their signs; hundreds, thousands of them must be teetering on bankruptcy at any given time.

Gokudera had never worked in catering and he had never been to a bar. But he was a city boy and he'd always done well in the metropolitan atmosphere, though he'd only ever lived it through the windows of his condominium apartment. He'd lived in this particular city for almost all of his life, but knew surprisingly little of its ins and outs, preferring to keep to himself in his small apartment whenever possible. He walked briskly down the dark main street now, shaking his long bangs in front of his eyes to cut out the harsh glare from the innumerable LED bar signs. He hadn't been out for long. He was usually never to be found outside at night and he had never been in this part of the city before. But now, through an unforeseeable series of events, he had been both driven and pulled here, to the city's famed club district.

He was going to try to pick up a guy.

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Gokudera entered the faculty lounge and crossed the room, making a beeline for the free coffee dispenser.

As usual, he scrupulously avoided making eye-contact with the other part-time lecturers at the college he taught at. They were chatting with each other around the large bulky table plopped down in the middle of the otherwise mostly bare room, sitting casually on top of the table or precariously on the edges of tilted chairs. They were all still fairly young or still thought they were, being in their late twenties or early thirties, somewhat older than Gokudera but not by a terrible lot. Jabbing the button of the dispenser with his middle finger, Gokudera crouched awkwardly over the slightly scuffed machine, silently willing it to quickly finish giving him his instant watery black coffee so he could slide back out of the room safely unnoticed. But the dispenser was cheap and also old, and vibrated worrisomely as it took its time processing Gokudera's order.

One of Gokudera's colleagues, a lecturer who'd been at the college at least five years preceding him, clapped her hands excitedly. "That sounds like a great idea!" she exclaimed, beaming around at the others in an arc that didn't include Gokudera. "I haven't been to a steakhouse in a while."

"Neither have I," said another lecturer. "Well, your joining us was good for something," he joked, slapping the newbie on the back and grinning to split his face. "Welcome to the fold!" The four or five of them laughed all together.

They'd all gotten a new colleague in the department, recently. A kid fresh out of undergraduate who wasn't that much younger than Gokudera, who'd taken on this job fresh out of college himself. Given the closeness in age, it would have theoretically made the most sense if the new kid became closest with Gokudera, but that would also have been the most surprising turn of events, given Gokudera's reclusiveness. Gokudera had been offered a similar welcome consisting of a dinner and drinks when he'd first taken on the job, but had quickly established himself as the loner type after he'd failed to do anything other than politely laugh at the others' rather lame jokes. By the time they had gotten around to passing around the beer for rounds, it was obvious that Gokudera had no intention of even emptying his first glass, and everyone had realized that Gokudera was simply not one of them.

Mistaking his antisocialness for shyness, they'd made efforts to reach out to him a few more times after that, encouraging him to come to their biannual or triannual colleague dinner outings, but had let him be after he'd declined all of them with the bland statement that he'd try to scrape up the money and the time for them and never followed up. Still, he'd been decent enough about his refusals, rubbing his neck in a show of apologetic embarrassment straight out of the book, and they neither disliked him nor liked him, which suited Gokudera just fine.

Now they were redirecting all the affection Gokudera had refused towards the newbie, who clearly relished the positive attention. "The first round's on me," he declared, seemingly determined to blow half his first paycheck before he'd even gotten it. "Actually, hold up," he giggled. "How many are even coming?"

"Yeah, with the meager pay we get, you really outta worry about that," someone responded, snickering. "I haven't asked around yet, but call it anywhere from five to seven. That sound good to you?"

"Oh yeah, yeah sure," the newbie replied, nodding vigorously and agreeing for the sake of agreeing.

They were just beginning to discuss what time they should get together for their dinner outing when the dispenser beeped to indicate that it was done. Gokudera snatched the flimsy paper cup of boiling coffee from under the dispenser slot with a practiced nimble touch. He took a packet of Sweet'N Low and ripped the top of it off hastily, sending a fine microdust spray of makeshift sugar over the counter. Dumping the rest of the contents of the packet into his cup, he reached for a straw to stir his coffee with as he blew the counter clean with a quick puff. He was reading for a creamer tub when an arm passed over his face to press the coffee dispenser button. Gokudera automatically moved away a step to the side to make space, both for the other person and for himself.

"Uh... say, Gokudera," the other person said. "You know with Matt just joining us and all, we were thinking of going out, you know, all us lecturers." He spoke slowly, clearly, as though trying not to scare Gokudera off. This colleague was one of the people who had approached Gokudera consistently to invite him to his welcome dinners when Gokudera had first taken the job at the college. He spoke as though Gokudera must not have heard a single word of what they were just talking about, though Gokudera had been less than five meters away the whole time; very probably, he actually thought that Gokudera had not heard. "We're thinking of meeting downtown near the central park square at around eight or so. You want to come?"

The invitation was evidently meant well, and the tone was friendly, but Gokudera hadn't majored in English to not be able to read between the lines, whether the words were written or spoken. He heard in the intonation that the invitation was a polite one only, asked only because the anticipated answer was a no. That hadn't been the case before. Gokudera was not quite surprised to realize that he wasn't wounded to know this.

"Oh, uh... I think I'm fine. Have plans this weekend," he replied softly. "But thanks anyway, though." Knowing that the four or so of his colleagues right behind him would be relieved at hearing him decline the invitation didn't hurt him, but it made him awkward. He jerkily shook the upside down creamer over his coffee.

"You sure? Well, haha, I'm sure, like you said, that you have things to do and such. Lemme know if you change your mind," the colleague said, speaking rather quickly as he picked up his coffee carefully by the tops of the cup and walked away to rejoin his circle.

As Gokudera left the faculty lounge with his fake coffee, hearing how the laughter and chitchat of his colleagues suddenly quieted with the shutting of the door, he wondered if he was supposed to have mildly smiled as he had turned down the group dinner. Would that have been the more appropriate thing to do, the gesture that would have humanized him in the eyes of the others? It didn't matter. He understood clearly then, as he stopped in the bare cement stairwell to take a sip of his hard-won coffee, that he didn't have friends in this city.

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That had been a little over two weeks ago.

Now he was roaming the club district, feeling that he might as well be wandering the shores of some foreign country for all that he knew of this new culture that he stood at the edges of.

He took out his phone and looked again at the picture of the landmark that he had found on a blogpost. The picture was of an opening of one of the many alleyways in the club district—that specific one was for the street with all the gay bars. He knew he was somewhere in the rough area of it. It was supposed to be in between Exit 5 and Exit 6 on the Green Line. He had just emerged from Exit 5 after a 40 minute ride on the Metro from his condo and he could just make out the post for Exit 6 straight ahead of him a little in the distance. Gokudera was grateful that the weather that afternoon was warm but with strong monsoon winds. He was in no hurry to find the alley with the rainbow flags as he strolled on with his hands in his pants pockets, and the breeze ruffled his hair, cooling his head. It didn't seem at all necessary that he find the gay bars anymore. Just coming out of his condo to go someplace for once had done him good.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of iridescent color as a bit of rainbow fabric waved frantically in the gusting wind. He'd found the street. Gokudera approached the opening of the alleyway cautiously, peering down the street as though it were a portal he could not return from should he step into it. It suddenly occurred to him that for the first time in his life, he was doing something that the common person of his age did on Friday nights on a Friday night. But even though it was the close of summer, 7 o'clock was still near broad daylight. Comfortingly, there weren't many people in the street, which was what he had hoped for.

Today, he was only a tourist. He would simply look around and check out the general area. Gokudera stepped into the alleyway and went down the sidewalk in search of a low-key bar he could sit and relax in. Checking out guys would come later.

/

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**Well, that concludes the 1st chapter of this story. Hope to see you in the 2nd.**

**(Btw, the rating of this story is subject to change and will most likely be going up over time.)**

**Let me know what you think. Leave me a _comment/ message/ review._**


	2. Different Desires

**(Some very minor edits made in the 1st chapter.)**

**Enjoy the 2nd.**

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From what he could tell, nothing distinguished the gay bar alley from the other alleys he had seen except for the couple of rainbow flags whipping about in the wind. Taking his hands out of his pants pockets, Gokudera proceeded down the long alley, looking for an establishment that might agree with him.

It was still light, but most of the shop signs were on anyway and garishly shone into his eyes when he glanced up every so often to catch the name of a bar on his side of the street. He wasn't sure precisely what he was looking for, but he knew what he didn't like when he saw it. Confident that he had as many choices left as the alley was long, he walked by many many bars without so much as a second glance.

Neon, flashy, or digital signs, and anything with sparkles were immediately out. So were sexual names. He felt embarrassed looking at signs crudely proclaiming themselves to be _The Manhole_, or _All Studs_, or even _The Cock_, and sarcastically wondered what hormonal high-schooler had named all of them. The sheer unoriginality of them bothered him much more than their sexuality, and it annoyed him that he couldn't think off the top of his head of alternatives for a name of a sexually-charged club, other than perhaps _The Hard Tissue Box_ or _The_ _ManPower Outlet_. It was really just as well, he thought, that he didn't have a few million dollars to spare to set up a bar. The names of the less sexual bars were not much better. If the sexual bars had called upon euphemisms for genitalia for inspiration, these bars largely used campish terminology from gay stereotypes. Gokudera had no interest in places such as _Big Queenie_ or _The Unicorn Horn_, and having been out for a decade since he was fifteen, could not imagine why anyone would find _The Closet_ to be a very appealing name.

He was aware that he was not quite being fair by judging the content of the bars purely by their signs, but with the bevy of selections he had, he could afford to be picky.

The first bar he found with a reasonably sensible name, he entered. The _P. and Q_. turned out not to be as he had thought, with strobe lights erratically streaking a dance floor that the people standing around at the edges didn't see fit to use and which seemed larger than necessary. Despite the open space, there was hardly anywhere to sit. When he walked in, only a few meters into the room and onto the floor, the four people standing around looked at him, and so did the bartender. Gokudera mutely swept his gaze across the room, met the eyes of the bartender briefly, and turned around and left the way he came in just as the bartender was about to open his mouth. He hadn't been in the bar for more than eight seconds.

This unfortunate series of events repeated two more times.

He couldn't help it. Almost none of the bars had clear shop fronts, so there was no way he could look into the bar from the street, and even the ones with the doors propped open to allow passersby a glance in didn't offer a very wide arc of view. Most of the bars had short passageways leading into the main of the bar, which meant that a door gaping open or not, nothing much of the actual bar could be seen from the outside. The son of a Marketing professor, Gokudera knew very well what game the bars were trying to play with him. They were teasing him, forcing him to enter on the assumption that he would feel obligated to stay and patronize the shop, whether he liked it or not, once he'd entered. Well, that trick wouldn't work on him. If he didn't like the place, he just spun on his heel and marched back out, though admittedly not without some discomfort.

Back into the damp wind that insisted on blowing his bangs in every direction except for the way he preferred to side-sweep them, he shouldered the other strap of his backpack that he had left dangling. He tried to angle his face towards the wind so that the breeze would blow his hair out of his line of vision for him, but there seemed to be multiple uncooperative strains of wind going against each other. He was pressing his bangs down to his forehead and waiting for a few cars to move out of the way when a stranger approached him.

"Uh, excuse me," the stranger said. He seemed to either be in his late twenties or early thirties and his permed curls resisted the whims of the wind better than Gokudera's very slightly wavy hair did. "Do you happen to know where _N-M_ is?"

"_N-M_? Is that the name of a bar?"

"A club, yes." The stranger continued to look at Gokudera as though he anticipated a helpful answer to come directly.

"Sorry, I don't know this district very well," Gokudera responded in absolute understatement, putting on a practiced half-smile of apology.

"Oh. Okay," the stranger said. "Thanks anyway." Swiveling his head wildly to catch the names of all the bars on both sides of the road, he staggered down the street in the direction that Gokudera had just come from.

Gokudera huffed a single laugh and then continued on his way, brushing roughly at his bangs with his hand.

What a strange world this was, he thought, where a guy wanting directions went down an entire sidewalk full of people only to stop at the one guy who had absolutely no clue as to what he was even talking about. Asking almost anybody else in the region would have resulted in a better answer. But it was always Gokudera whom they picked to ask for directions. They walked away from the Metro map to ask him which way they should go to get to a certain station, when he wasn't even the closest person to them in the vicinity. They ignored the shopping mall employee to ask him where the Sperrys store was, while he was just randomly cutting through the department store in his squeaky sneakers to escape the rain. Gokudera had yet to point out the correct way to anybody.

He still didn't know what he was looking for—he had come to the club district on impulse, because he was suddenly struck with the need for some company, and he knew nothing more than that.

Gokudera had now been on the street for a little under thirty-five minutes; it was now 7:30. If anyone had watched him over the last half hour, they would have gotten the definite impression that he must be lost, aimlessly drifting as he was in the course of the least exciting bar-hopping possible. Sheepish and slightly sorry that he was being rude to the people in the bars he'd visited and abandoned, and tired of wandering about in an area that wasn't suited for him in normal circumstances, he resolved to keep put in the next place he entered for at least ten minutes. Then, he would lit out for home. He had already wasted too much time.

Having made this resolution, he became twice as selective and judgmental. The bar to meet his standards hiked itself up. He didn't want to go home having achieved nothing; at the very least, he wanted to find a not intolerable bar so that he might be able to force himself to come to this part of the city again. Gokudera glanced down the smaller alleys branching out of the main one as he quickened his pace, thinking that it was quite possible that the establishments on the less expensive real estate would be more low-key. It was also very possible, though, that they would be much more sleazy.

He was near the end of the main street now. It was now or never. Walking around a garbage spill on the sidewalk on the penultimate turn into a minor alleyway before the main alley ended, he backtracked a little into the road to get a better look at the signs on the uniquely obtuse turning point. A sign stuck out from the wall of the building, reading _Stevie's Corner_. A larger version of the same sign hung above a narrow framed door squeezed in between another bar and some shop that was closed with the protective metal grating pulled down. The sign was not flashy at all. It was very basic, with only the two words written in unflamboyant black font in front of a plain cream background. One of the lights illuminating the panel of the display from behind must have gone out, because there was a grey strip marring the margins of the otherwise clean-cut sign. The clunky sheet-metal door under the sign was held open by means of a wooden doorstop jabbed into the crack of the hinges. The open passageway exposed a rather steep but short set of stairs down to a more decorative door that was the real entrance into the place.

Gokudera, having grown up just a few blocks down from a red light district just before his family had temporarily relocated to America from Italy due to his father's job, associated such underground passages with seediness. But here, he didn't see the other cues of disrepute, such as eye-sore plastic neon signs and littered pamphlets with scribbled phone numbers. It was unlikely, too, that a place relatively close to the opening of the main street would be anything extreme.

So, Gokudera hoped for the best and tightly held onto the handrail as he took the stairs down into _Stevie's Corner_.

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"C'mon guys, you have to finish up, now," Yamamoto said for the second time. "It's 7:34, almost time for your guys' busses to leave, isn't it?"

A couple of the straggling remaining students groaned and one dropped her head onto the desk in a playful exaggeration of despair. Another student called out cheekily, "I don't take the bus, though," and threw a wide grin up at Yamamoto.

Yamamoto amiably shook his head at them and let them have the extra time. This was the first major test he had given then since starting the class, so he was inclined to be a bit lenient. He remembered, too, that back when he used to be a high school student, and into his college years, he used to be one of the very last, if not the last, to turn in his exams, so he could understand their predicament. Besides, at least two of the six remaining students seemed to be diligently rechecking their work rather than rushing through the last few problems, and he couldn't begrudge them that. He went back to grading the tests from the previous class.

A kid flipped his test over in a flutter of papers and zipped up his pencil case. His twin sister did the same as he got up from his seat and they turned in their exams together.

"Was it good?" Yamamoto asked them, lowering his voice to be polite to the test-takers.

"Haha, well, I feel pretty okay about it," whispered the sister. "Yeah, I feel alright," agreed the brother. "Good night. See you Sunday," they said, and left quietly.

Two or three minutes later, three kids got up all around the same time, clearly none of them wanting to be the last one left in the class, and handed their test papers in, sighing dramatically in Shakespearean fashion. "I don't see anything but all these curvy lines, now," said one. "Man, why were there so many integral graphs and stuff?" "Have mercy," said simply another student, putting his hands together in a prayer position and mock crying.

"Aw, I'm sure all of you did just fine," Yamamoto reassured them, smiling kindly as he took their tests. "Don't worry. I'm grading the previous class' exams and no one's gotten below a B – so far."

Once the last remaining student had put down her pencil with a satisfied nod at her work and had left the classroom, Yamamoto got up from the teacher's desk and started packing up. The over sixty AB Calculus exams he had from all his classes bulged out from his folder as he gripped them firmly to avoid sending an avalanche of paper everywhere. He closed the window on his computer where he had been cataloguing his students' grades and slipped his laptop into his briefcase along with his other things. After one final glance around the classroom, he switched off the light with his elbow and headed for the teacher's office.

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It was closing-time at the tutoring academy where Yamamoto worked full-time as a Calculus AB and BC teacher. With the busses all departed, he was one of the last ones, faculty or student, left in the building. He was surprised to see a bar of light under the door of the teacher's office as he approached it from down the hallway.

"Mr. Yamamoto!" Yamamoto was greeted with a bright smile and a friendly tone of voice by Michelle, who had been one of his students a few years back and who was now interning for the AP Physics department. "I haven't seen you in a while!"

"Hey Michelle," he said, smiling back, setting his briefcase down on the other end of the long table that she was working on. "It's good to see you. But what are you still doing here? Didja miss the bus?"

"No, I don't take the bus on Fridays," she said. "My mom picks me up for dinner but she's running a little late today. She's going to come in like twenty minutes or something like that."

"Oh, okay, well that's good." Yamamoto opened the bulging folder of exams that he had carried over from the classroom and picked out the papers he had already graded and catalogued. He placed them in a separate folder and put the folder into his mailbox cubby.

"So how've you been?" asked Michelle, while he was organizing his papers.

"I've been doing just fine. Can't complain," he responded cheerfully. "How about you? How's senior year going?"

"Oh my god, I'm dying," she said, laughing at herself. "I'm taking six AP classes, and it's just like… why? Why exactly did I choose to do this to myself, again? And college applications, my god, that's a whole 'nother beast!"

Yamamoto nodded in agreement and sympathy. "Oh yeah, I remember those days, too. It's definitely tough, real tough." He lowered his dark eyebrows and jokingly feigned sternness. "But I know you're not going to slack off and catch senioritis, though, right?"

"No guarantees second semester." She winked, which provoked startled laughter from Yamamoto.

As he nabbed a ballpoint pen rolling around on the table to make a few final corrections to some test papers before he left, he looked over at what Michelle was doing. He had assumed that she must be doing Physics-related things, since she was the Physics intern, but now he saw that she was writing in minute script on black construction paper on a project that was decidedly not academic. "Uhm, are you writing with white-out?" he asked her, watching her cover the black paper with her white bubbly handwriting.

"No!" she exclaimed, laughing at his mistake and holding up her writing utensil for him to see. "It's white pen, haven't you ever seen one before? It's just pen with white ink. They sell it in most artsy stores now."

"Ah." He politely leaned forward to look at the pen Michelle was holding out. "Very cool."

"Yeah, it's so pretty, right?" Michelle lifted her hands away from the paper she was writing on and slid it towards him a little bit, though she clearly didn't mean for him to take it or to read it. With the paper unobscured, Yamamoto saw that her neat writing formed the shape of a large heart. "It's for my boyfriend. On Tuesday, it's our 100th day anniversary!" she said proudly.

The paper she was writing on was a fairly large one, a little over the area of two sheets of printer paper, and the heart took up as much space as possible on the paper while still remaining a heart. Even besides this, the writing was tiny, looking to be about the equivalent of font size 8 or 9 in Times New Roman. Yamamoto was concerned and more than a little stunned at the ridiculous amount of effort that Michelle was putting into this romantic project.

"Is that a very important landmark for a relationship?" He laughed partly in amusement and partly in alarm. "Is this what you kids do these days?"

"'What you kids do these days?'" Michelle repeated, giggling. "Oh c'mon, you're not that old! You're still in your twenties, aren't you?"

"Huh, just barely!" Yamamoto confessed honestly. He glanced quickly again at the almost completed fat heart that filled up the paper. If the size of the writing had been larger by a few degrees and the paper had been about the size of regular printer paper, he would have thought that her celebration of her 100th day anniversary with her boyfriend was cute and perfectly appropriate. If one of his friends had attempted such a brave project, not that he could imagine any of them doing so, he would have groaned and teased them about how flies would soon be drawn to their sickly sweet lurve. But Michelle's actual project was so extensive and sappy, and overall so intense, that he felt slightly disturbed just contemplating it. "Uh…your boyfriend," he said, gesturing weakly towards Michelle's heroically romantic project. "Is he planning anything?"

"He'd better be," she joked. "Actually, over the weekend, we're going out for dinner. If he's got anything other than that planned, he hasn't told me. I mean, but of course he hasn't. It's not like I've told him about this."

"…Mhm…Don't you think, though, that if you just spring something like this on him, he'll be a bit, uh… overwhelmed?" In his head, he thought "freaked out," but was careful to be nice to Michelle and not hurt her feelings. "I mean, especially if he hasn't prepared something for you of this caliber."

"Haha, I don't think that's going to be a problem. He gets me flowers simply all the time and everything; he won't disappoint." She giggled at his awkwardness again. "You look really shocked, but at least at my school, this kind of thing is pretty common for couples. This girl in junior year now, she has this boyfriend from a different school, and last year he came over and made all these declarations with posters in the hallway and gave her a promise ring because it was their 1 year anniversary. Like, to the kids at my school, that was unusual, obviously, but not weird. But Mr. Yamamoto, talking about this kind of reminds me! I don't think I've ever asked you, but are you with anyone?"

Yamamoto shook his head. "No."

"Ooh, you gotta start thinking about that kind of thing; start putting yourself out there! I can't imagine that you'll have any problem with the ladies," Michelle told him, as though she thought she was giving him a serious confidence boost. Yamamoto looked at her blankly, saw that she truly believed she was being either friendly or helpful by saying such things, and thought for the first time that she was something of the typical ditsy teenage girl as stereotyped on TV.

He had no idea how he was supposed to respond, so he just laughed politely.

"Trust me, Mr. Yamamoto," she went on, taking his tepid response the wrong way and apparently encouraged. "If you just get the romantic thing down on lock, and do some nice things, you'll have the ladies tripping over themselves for you!"

The retort, "What makes you think I even want to be in a relationship?" flashed through Yamamoto's mind, but he was too much of a gentleman to put down Michelle when she was so plainly excited, and didn't feel the need to kill her happy speculations about him. He also didn't feel that it was important to inform her that he was gay in a insipid bit of chitchat like this, when it wouldn't make a significant difference to the matter at hand. "Michelle, you flatter me," was the uninspired response that fell out of his mouth.

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Yamamoto was saved from further unsavory conversation in this vein when the door of the teacher's office flew open and one of his colleagues in the math department burst inside. Despite the fact that he must have seen the light from the hallway, the colleague had evidently not expected to find people in the office. He paused and looked at Yamamoto, glanced at Michelle, and then returned his gaze to Yamamoto in quick succession.

"Mr. Yamamoto," he said in some surprise. "You're still around?"

"As are you. I'm just finishing up these last few papers and keeping Michelle here company."

"Oh, well, I'm just stopping by to check my mailbox before I go, but I'm still here because my wife's got the car and she's picking me up today," the colleague explained, walking further into the room and towards Yamamoto. "Whoa, you're grading all those before you go?"

"Oh no, just really only marking the grade down on these last two."

"That's a hella lot of papers you got there, though! I'd forgotten you teach about twelve different classes. I keep telling ya that you should get an intern to do all that dirty work for you," he said, impertinently grinning at Michelle who narrowed her eyes at him. The colleague was about three or four years older than Yamamoto, but had been working at the academy for almost seven years longer than Yamamoto had, who had only just joined the faculty last year.

"I can manage just fine," Yamamoto assured him. "But talking about managing, how's it going with little Rick Jr.?" The colleague and his wife had had a baby four months ago and Yamamoto, as well as the other tutors in the math department, had been invited to a party not long ago to congratulate the genesis of the happy family.

"Oh, he's doing absolutely great," Rick Sr. beamed. "Really healthy, and he smiles so much! Actually, my wife's picking me up today after picking up her cousin from the airport, and her cousin's a semiprofessional photographer, so we're thinking of doing a family portrait."

"Oh wow, that's just…Wow, that's such an awesome idea!" Next to him, Michelle bobbed her head rapidly in support of Yamamoto's statement. "You should definitely do that."

"It'd be the cutest thing!" Michelle squealed. "You have to show us the pictures afterwards!"

Rick Sr. laughed in appreciation of her enthusiasm. "Will do," he promised. He emptied his mailbox into his messenger bag and smiled at them on his way out. "Catch you later; Have a good weekend."

/

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Soon after this interaction, Yamamoto finished electronically recording the two grades he had been working on and moved the corresponding two exam papers into the finished folder. He bid goodbye to Michelle and tripped out of the academy building down the road to the public bus stop, swinging his briefcase loosely in his hand.

It was ten to eight and the sky was beginning to redden and darken. The after-work rush hour had largely passed and had transitioned into dinnertime; there weren't very many people scuttling about on the streets anymore. Considering that this general area was part of the wider business and supplementary academia districts, there were surprisingly few restaurants lining the roads; only mostly cafes and the odd bakery. Yamamoto's bus stop was located right in front of a large cafe specializing in pretzels, and he listened sometimes to the tinny and unfamiliar modern pop music playlist of the cafe that reached his ears over the whooshing night wind. As he stood and waited for the bus, positioned just so that the nearby streetlamp blocked the glare from the setting sun, Yamamoto wanted very much to go home.

He was thinking about the two conversations he had just had. They blurred together unpleasantly in the confused memory of his tired mind.

His colleague had wished him a good weekend, under the assumption that he had the weekend off. In reality, Saturday was his longest work day and Sunday his second longest, because those two days were the days when students were guaranteed to be out of regular school and the academy had chosen to cram this time frame fit to burst. While he'd be drudging away teaching the same exact two classes about five to six times in near unbroken succession, Michelle would be having a pleasant dinner date with her boyfriend, celebrating the first major landmark in their relationship. Rick Sr. and his wife would be photographically preserving their family's heyday with their precious new four month old baby. Yamamoto had been in this city for a little over a year and the novelty was wearing off. He was satisfied living here and was happy with his job, but nothing particularly special had happened to him in a while.

His bus rattled up and he got on it, noting that the money on his rapid transit card was running low. He would have to recharge it at the Metro station near his stop. Yamamoto put the card, which was attached to his phone, into his front pocket after taking his phone off silent. Just like businessmen always seemed to do in the movies the minute after their working day was done, Yamamoto took off his blazer jacket and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt in the middling heat of the bus. He wanted to loosen his tie to complete the process, but he didn't have one on because his job didn't require it. Gripping the overhead handles firmly with both hands as the bus barrelled down the highway, no doubt frightening the small sedan cars on the surrounding lanes and provoking some not entirely undeserved under-the-breath cussing, Yamamoto hazily pondered that he knew better now, than he had ever before, that every day was the first day of the rest of his life.

His stop was only ten to fifteen minutes away from the academy, so he was dropped off fairly quickly, before any very strange thoughts tumbled into his head from the wild rocking of the bus and before his growling stomach embarrassed him too much.

He took the escalator down into the Metro station so he could cross under the street to his apartment complex. His phone sang one high clear chime to notify him of a text message. It was from his sister Janice, asking him if he wanted to Skype with her in the next few days. When he had decided that he was going to take the job at the academy, he'd been worried about being lonely, being in a state completely separate from all his friends and family back at his home state. Everyone had assured him that there would be no problem whatsoever in keeping touch, and everyone had more or less kept their word. Despite living in a place all to himself for the first time, he had had no real chance to be lonely. Yamamoto smiled fondly at hearing from his sister, but put his phone away without replying to the text.

He was two thirds of the way to his condo from the Metro station when he realized that he'd forgotten to recharge his card. The walk back was only a very brief one, but Yamamoto just kept on striding forward. He could recharge it tomorrow morning. Right now, it was him who was running empty, and he wanted to scarf down whatever was left in the fridge and just go to sleep.

/

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**Obviously, this chapter introduced Yamamoto and focused a bit more on him than on Gokudera. Gokudera will take the lead again in the 3rd chapter.**

**What do you think about these two and how the story is progressing?**

**Please _comment/ message/ review._**


	3. Inside the Bar

**Enjoy the 3rd.**

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Gokudera fingered the edges of the shirt sleeves he had rolled up and smoothed down his front with a quick sweep of his forearm. He checked how he looked in the strip of shiny distorted metal on the outlines of the door. Unsurprisingly, his hair was mussed, and of course not of the deliciously windswept kind that only existed in fashion advertisements. As long as his bangs were more or less in place, though, he could care less what the rest of him looked like. He pushed into the bar.

Gokudera's only previous experience with bars before today was walking past the neighborhood ones on the street while going to and from work. The only thing he knew about them was that at night, it was a good thing to do to try to stay on the outer edges of the sidewalk while walking past them, and that he should not, under any circumstances, make eye contact with the drunk people that could sometimes be found staggering about outside. He'd done it once, and not by accident either.

\

The drunk had been so far from walking anywhere, let alone in a straight line, that it was quite evident that the bar that he was less than 10 meters from had just kicked him out. He was able, just barely, to keep himself standing, but not without wobbling in a kind of ridiculous 1 meter radius. Gokudera, in his late teens then, had been going back home after a night walk in the local park. Walking down the street, he saw the drunk from a long way off and was captivated by him. It was the most interesting thing he'd seen all night. The drunk tripped over some garbage bags outside, though thankfully he didn't spill the trash. He began cussing erratically at nothing and noone in particular, leaning awkwardly against the telephone pole that had caught his fall.

Gokudera didn't hide that he was looking directly at the drunk as he approached him. He wasn't about to restrain himself from enjoying the best show he'd seen in a while. He wasn't brave enough to turn his head towards the drunk, but he didn't take his eyes off. It was perhaps inevitable that he be caught.

"Y-you!" the drunk shouted. There were other people around, but it was obvious that he meant Gokudera even if he wasn't pointing directly at him. It was a scene straight out of a shitty TV drama. "What the f-fuck are yah lookin' at?! Huh? Stoopid muthafucker…"

"I'm top of my class, actually," Gokudera felt like telling him, just to be a little cruel. But he walked by like he hadn't heard.

When he got home, he told his dad with some amusement, and a little pride, what had happened. His dad had sighed and pressed a hand to his forehead. He said that Gokudera had been stupid to go literally looking for trouble like that and told him to never do it again, before turning back to his computer screen.

/

This new bar experience was entirely separate from that interaction with the drunk so many years ago, and was better than the other bars he'd flitted across. That much was apparent at first glance. The only thing remaining to find out was whether it would be as interesting. The door had a small bell attached to it that tinkled gently as he walked in, announcing his arrival.

The two customers and the bartender inside all automatically turned their heads to look at the new person. Gokudera was surprised to find people besides himself in the bar. He had reasoned that if there were hardly any people in the bars on the main street, there was hardly going to be anyone patronizing a bar underground on a side alley. In retrospect, he realized that this made no sense—his original plan had been to meet guys, so why should he enter a bar he thought was empty? Either way, he was satisfied with the quiet atmosphere in _Stevie's Corner_ and sat himself down.

_Stevie's Corner_ had a counter at the front with five or so stools, little square tables around the edges of the rest of the room, and a smallish open space in the middle that seemed to be meant for dancing should anyone really want to. But it clearly wasn't a dance or a dive bar like the other bars Gokudera had flitted by. If Gokudera had to put a description on it, he would say that it was a cafe that had gotten converted into a bar. He unembarrassedly checked how much money he had in his wallet under the waiting gaze of the bartender before he ordered a non-alcoholic strawberry-kiwi smoothie.

Having nothing to do, he slowly spun in circles on his stool as he drank his extremely cold drink, taking in every angle of and all the people in the place. The bartender looked to be in his early thirties, and the two other customers, their late thirties. Being the youngest in the bar, Gokudera felt free to act like a child.

The two were on the other side of the bar, sitting across from each other on one of the small tables at the very back. They had both glanced at Gokudera when he had come in, but had ignored him ever since. Gokudera guessed that they had just been introduced to each other by friends and were maybe moving towards dating. They seemed awkwardly affectionate with each other, nodding or making a noise at every little thing the other said. One of them was speaking significantly more than the other and he wasn't very physically attractive, but his round rich voice sounded like it could belong to an anchor of an educational radio station. His mellow tones, though not particularly loud, smoothly cut across the room under the background music so that Gokudera could have transcripted his words had he the inclination to do so. The conversation was boring, though, and after a moment, Gokudera blocked it from his mind. Their voices washed over him like tea spilled over the sleeve of a windbreaker, so that the warmth was felt but not the substance.

Gokudera swiveled around on his stool and faced the front. The bartender was leaning against the edge of the counter some four meters away, with his back to the bar, playing some game on his cellphone and eating M&M's.

Gokudera cleared his throat. "Uhm… Excuse me?" The bartender didn't hear him. He tapped on the counter a little uncomfortably and tried again, raising his voice a little. "Excuse me… Hello?"

The bartender turned, saw Gokudera looking at him, and came over with his phone still in hand. "Yes?"

"I'm not ordering anything, but, uh, would it be alright if I asked you a few questions?"

The bartender tilted his head a little curiously. "Okay. What kind of questions?" He looked slightly annoyed that he'd been interrupted from his game for something that wasn't in his job description, but Gokudera could have been reading his face wrong.

"Nothing personal," Gokudera assured him, realizing belatedly that he should have mentioned this earlier. "Just about this bar and the district and that. I'm new to this, see."

"Yeah?" The bartender pulled up his stool so that he could sit on the opposite side of the counter from Gokudera. "Okay, ask away."

"Uh…how's this bar in terms of meeting people? New people?"

"Like, you mean in comparison to other bars?"

Gokudera shrugged. Since he didn't know what other bars were like, a strict comparison with them wasn't going to do him a whole lot of good, but he was just grateful that the bartender didn't laugh at him. "Yeah, sure."

"I mean…honestly, there are better places. It's easiest to get together with new people in louder, more active bars than this. Dance bars, you know, stuff like that. This is a really kinda subdued place, but," he laughed, "you've probably already noticed that."

"So it doesn't really happen here?"

"Well, it doesn't not happen, I'm just saying that it won't be as easy."

Gokudera wasn't sure if the bartender was being perfectly honest or if he was making the bar sound more appealing just because he worked here, but he nodded all the same. "And is the atmosphere in here now about the atmosphere at its busiest times?"

"Uhm… yeah, pretty much. With more people, obviously, but yeah, just mostly chill all around."

Gokudera nodded again and bit his bottom lip a little. "Uhm," he said, and smiled at the counter to emphasize his shyness so that the bartender would be less inclined to laugh at his next, also awkward, question. "The other kind of bars you were talking about, how would you talk to anyone there? You know, cuz the music's so loud."

"Just talk louder, really." The bartender laughed, but kindly. He set his phone down on a shelf under the counter and reached for his M&M's. "I don't know that most people in those bars are there to talk to people, though." He held out his bag of M&M's. "Want some?"

"I'm good. Still have to drink this," Gokudera replied, holding up his smoothie glass which was still more than half full and taking a sip through the light green straw. He saw that the bartender was warming to him. It could have been for any number of reasons. Maybe he was being nice because he appreciated that Gokudera wasn't flirting with him, or because he knew that Gokudera was younger, or because he thought Gokudera's innocence was cute.

Before Gokudera could think of another question to ask, the bartender spoke. "So you're new to the club district? You just move here?"

"No, I've lived about 30 minutes off from here almost all my life, actually."

"Yeah? Well, now's a good time to be here. Gotta do it when you're still young, you know."

"Mhm hmm," Gokudera responded through a mouthful of smoothie. It was trite advice, but he was being polite. He wouldn't have come to this district if that thought hadn't already been painfully obvious to him. If he didn't have such a strong aversion to online dating, he would never have turned to bars. And if he was straight and meeting potential romantic interests was easier, the thought of going to bars would never even have crossed his mind. "I had stuff going on before," he vaguely excused himself.

The bartender nodded sympathetically. "We've all been there," he said.

Gokudera briefly wondered what the hell he was talking about—by "stuff," he had meant college studies, and that didn't warrant sympathy—before he realized that the bartender probably thought that he had only just come out and had recently gone through trouble with his family. After all, the cluelessness that he was exuding and his timidity about approaching guys gave off the impression that he was new to this game, not only of picking up people, but of picking up guys in particular. Gokudera recalled that he had said that he was "new to this," and could understand how that phrase might have been taken the wrong way. He didn't bother correcting the bartender.

"You have any tips on meeting guys?" he asked.  
The bartender grinned wickedly. "Protection, buddy. Use it," he said.

Smiling and huffing in embarrassment at having expected a serious answer, Gokudera waved him off. "Not that. I mean approaching people."

Snickering, the bartender lifted his hands towards the ceiling. "I dunno what to tell ya, kid," he said. "I guess just don't be a dick and make eye-contact and smile. You don't have to turn cartwheels or nothing, don't be so worried." Then he saw that Gokudera's polite smile was half-hearted and assumed a more serious manner. "C'mon. I know everyone says it, but just be yourself. If you don't find someone, someone will find you."

He popped some M&M's in his mouth and crunched them sharply, resuming his grin. "In the the meanwhile, you want a drink?"

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/

Gokudera climbed out of _Stevie' Corner_, his stomach full and his mind blank. He'd declined to get a drink and had gotten out of there as soon as he had finished his smoothie. It was a little over eight and he wanted to get out of the club district before people started really pouring in. Gokudera looked down the main street the way he had come, deliberating, but ultimately decided to go out the nearest end and find another subway station.

The sky had gotten noticeably darker in the space of a half hour. Gokudera's shadow stretched out long and black behind him as he walked clutching at the straps of his backpack. As he went down the remaining bit of street, going a little slower than before with the thick smoothie churning inside him, he wondered how many times he would have to repeat this trip before he met success. If he met success. He wondered if he would ever drink enough to get drunk, and if it would be out of despair, hopelessness, or perhaps helplessness. He didn't want to go to dance bars to meet people. But he didn't know how he would meet guys in the kind of places he preferred.

Surely, he thought, there must be other guys like me. Guys who aren't here just to get shit-faced and have sex. Who are looking to have a pleasant chat first and foremost. He knew he was a rare breed—his entire, largely solitary, life was a testament to that—but he refused to believe that he was so rare that there was absolutely no one compatible with him. Purely realistically, out of the 7 billion people on this earth, there had to be at least a few.

So where the hell were they? No wonder the bartender had thought that he had only just gotten out of the closet; people like him might as well be in the closet for all their invisibility. The frustration was terrible. It seemed that the diamonds in the rough couldn't shine without a searchlight on them. Gokudera appreciated that the modern era, with its social networking and sexual revolution and fast-paced life, had liberated so many people; but felt that flinging open that door and keeping it wide open had come at the cost of people like him. He was the doorstop jabbed into the hinges at _Stevie's bar._

What the fuck, Gokudera said to himself, running his fingers through his hair and scowling at nothing and nobody in particular. I'm not a teenager anymore. I shouldn't be feeling these kind of things.

But as he slipped out of the gay bar alley, he wondered sincerely, for the first time, why the man who had yelled at him all those years ago had felt the need to get so drunk as that.

/

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**Suggestions? (Constructive) Criticisms? Tell me your thoughts.**

******Please _comment/ message/ review._**


	4. Human Interaction

**4th chapter up!**

**Enjoy.**

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By the time he had found a metro station and started making his way home, Gokudera's anger had subsided into something not quite like disappointment.

Just all part of the process. It was easier to think that, waiting for the next train after transferring metro lines for the second and last time, only to watch the previous train pull out of the station right when he got there. It was always like this. He wondered how many more times he would have to repeat this trip before he met anyone at the club district. Even setting aside the emotional annoyance of it all, he'd be getting seriously negative returns if he didn't meet someone decent soon, simply because of the time expenditure and the cost of buying drinks just to be in a bar. This whole going to bars thing was a nasty business, but… no use complaining when there was no alternative. He had to keep on telling himself that, until he believed it.

Gokudera looked around for a place to sit. He was on Line 9, the Grey line, one of the last lines added to the Metro system and which ran through the less inhabited, less developed parts of the city. The train for this line didn't come often; it was a 20 minute wait.

The nearest bench had a person sprawled across it. The person wasn't taking up enough space to stop someone who really wanted to sit from sitting, but enough so that Gokudera was content to stand a few meters away on the pretense of a reading a large advertisement partially covered by the guy's head. The guy was a college-age kid, a little younger than Gokudera. He was sleeping, lying back on the bench with his mouth a bit open. Though he was larger than the average man, almost certainly at least a good half a foot taller than Gokudera, the way his arms were loosely wrapped around his backpack made him seem like he was taking up very little space for a guy his size.

If I had those M&M's that that bartender had, I could just lean over and drop one in, Gokudera thought, looking at the kid's half-open mouth. A more devious person than me might even be able to slip him some poison. The kid's lips weren't parted very wide, but it was certainly possible.

It was also possible, though, that the kid might just wake up naturally when approached, for whatever the reason. Anyone drawing close to him from his direct front would have the light behind him, and the shadow he would cast on the kid might be enough to rouse him from his deceptively deep sleep. Even if the change in lighting wasn't an issue, though, Gokudera thought, it was still possible that the kid might just wake up on his own. He'd done it himself enough times, on schoolbus rides, or in clinic waiting rooms, or on the very rare instances in which he'd drowsed in class. Just wake up on his own, without being disturbed by noise or touch, as though he sensed the body heat emanating from the intruder into his hypersensitive personal bubble.

The loud advertisement behind the kid was for some action movie that was in theaters at present. The kid, though, was clearly not coming back from such a trip to the movies. From the looks of it, he was going home after a night college class. Or maybe he'd failed to get into college and was taking supplementary academia to prepare for the next go-around; that seemed to be growing more and more common in this age of second and third and fourth chances. He clearly wasn't coming back from work. He looked too much like a student through and through with his fading acne scars and slightly crumpled casual clothes and canvas drawstring backpack with papers showing through the opening gap. Despite his size, the white flesh of his exposed arms looked soft and there was a childlike aura about him, like he was still very much learning what to do with himself.

Gokudera stood over the kid like he was watching guard over him, arms crossed and summing him up.

The kid was an easy target for attack. Sleeping, weak, he was out in the open, and yet with nothing to fear. The city was a pretty safe one and what muggers that existed were clever and didn't take unnecessary risks; it could be immediately seen that there was nothing substantial to be gained by advancing on him. There were CCTV cameras all around the metro anyway, though Gokudera wasn't sure how many of them were real.

Gokudera gazed at the kid's comatose face and wondered what might happen if the kid opened his eyes. He knew what the realistic scenario was, of course, but it was no fun to imagine non-encounters that happened all the time. He thought of how in romantic comedy movies, straight boys and girls met randomly in public places like this and flirted, exchanged phone numbers, hooked up. He thought too, of how in the bad old days, gay men could only find each other through subtle hints and had to hope that that stranger would know to follow them into the public restroom for a quick, torrid fuck. He considered sitting on the edge of the bench, but decided against it. He wasn't sure that even if the guy woke up right that moment and smiled at him, scootching over to make space, whether he would sit down. Fantasizing was all well and good, but even though the bartender had said "before you get old" instead of "while you're still young," he wasn't yet low enough to even consider picking up some loser on the fucking subway, damn it.

Besides, he didn't know how to. And the kid wasn't even attractive anyway.

Gokudera turned to look at the overhead monitor behind him. The monitor showed the previous two stops and the upcoming trains' progression. A moment after he turned, the next train popped up on the screen and crept towards him. Gokudera took one last glance at the kid on the bench and started walking towards the other end of the station, as though he would meet the train halfway.

When the train finally came, Gokudera got up from his empty bench and stepped into the very first car, choosing to stand even though there were plenty of seats available. He stood at the borders of the doorway, waiting for the train to take him the last three stops to his condo. After a minute or two, the crackling of the speaker turning on sounded and the conductor announced that the doors would be shutting soon. Thirty seconds later, he repeated the announcement and the sliding doors shut with the hiss of sealing plastic.

As the train left the station, Gokudera wondered if the sleeping kid got on, but then yawned.

/

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Even though Yamamoto was tired, he knew he was just going to be more tired over the weekend, so he signed onto Skype after eating dinner. When he saw that his sister wasn't online, he texted her to let her know that he was good to go.

Grinning, Yamamoto wiped his computer webcam lens with his sleeve and accepted her video call when it came fifteen minutes later.

"Takeshi!" Janice said as soon as the call started. She was in her pajamas and was apparently balancing her computer on her knees as she sat in bed. "Did you just get back from work? You look like shit!"

Yamamoto snickered. Janice, his one and only sibling, was seven years older than him and was accustomed to giving him friendly abuse, which he returned. They were very close. It had been a couple weeks since he had last talked to her and he was glad to see her now. "Thanks so much. You don't look so hot yourself with your makeup off, ya know… I don't usually get off work this late, but I just gave out a test and was staying back, grading and stuff."

"Aww, poor you. So is the regular term going okay? I mean, I know that your weekends are busier now, but I thought you were freer on weekdays."

"Oh, I am. The hours are fewer and everything, it's just that they're also later. Except for the weekends, my real workday teaching classes doesn't really start until after noon. So it'd be better to call in the mornings for me, but you're at work then."

Janice nodded. She was a commercial lawyer for an accounting company and had been ever since she graduated from law school at the top of her class. "Well, this is still good, though, and it's usually nicer to talk at nights than in the day. You're not too tired, though?"

"Far from it," Yamamoto promised.

"Okay, so, well, anything interesting happen lately?"

Yamamoto laughed. "We always start out our conversations like this. And I usually always tell you that nothing happened and then you talk about some interesting case you got or something, but today, today I do have something interesting!" he said almost proudly. "Uhm, this happened just a few hours ago, actually, and I was just thinking about it, but what do you feel about anniversary celebrations? Like, for relationships?"

"I think it's a good thing. You know, kinda fun and touching to mark off 1 year, and then 2, and so on. Mom and dad are almost at their 35th wedding anniversary, and I think by that time, it'll get kinda boring, but it's still nice for me, on my 4th year with Garrett. He likes it too; makes far more of a fuss than I do, really." Garrett was an accountant at the company that she worked for; they had hit it off wonderfully within months of her joining the company. Though not officially engaged, they lived together as though they were married, and everyone knew that they would be married in the not-so-distant future. "Why? Is one of your colleagues' anniversary coming up?"

"Oh no, but there was this intern who was kinda making a big fuss out of the 100th day with her boyfriend. I mean… talk about the stereotype of girls freaking out so much more over relationship stuff than guys do, right? Well, she had this huge black heart—I don't know why she chose black, but now that I think about it, that's a bit odd—but anyway she was writing this love letter on it and I was like, whoa! You know? Just overdoing it by a mile! I tried to talk her out of it, but nothing doing."

"How old's the girl?"

"Eighteen, I should think. Senior in high school."

"What'd you say to her to try to talk her out of it?"

"Well…talking her out of it was a bit of an exaggeration. I just…expressed caution for what she was doing. I think I told her… no, I asked her if her boyfriend was preparing something as major as that, or something like that. I wasn't harsh or anything, not at all! I mean… I know I'm just this math teacher at this academy, but it seemed like such a recipe for disaster. You…you should've seen it," Yamamoto finished lamely, wondering if he'd overstepped his place after all.

"Ah well, I can't say too much 'cause I didn't see it, like you said, but you know how high school relationships are." She smiled in slight amusement. "100th day anniversary, huh? It's funny…I feel like I was excited at the passing of every month when I dated in middle and high school, but man, after graduating from college, anything less than a year isn't even worth talking about all of a sudden."

"'Cause people want commitment then, or to a significantly greater extent than they did before," Yamamoto added. Then he laughed a little nervously. "But you know, I was kind of thinking, too. People are more inclined to overblow it in their first serious relationships, whatever their age, especially if they've never dated before."

Janice immediately knew what he was getting at. Yamamoto had never dated before, not even for so much as a day. Their family didn't pressure him to get into a relationship, but their parents had been slightly concerned ever since he graduated from undergraduate, and then went on to get his Master's, without so much as a sign of getting in a relationship with anyone. It had made a tad bit more sense when he came out in his junior year of college, but that just exacerbated the problem of how he was supposed to date. "Well, I don't think that's necessarily the case," she said, partly to comfort him but also because she believed it in it. "There might be the random person who overblows it when they're younger and then calms down as they get older, or more experienced; but I should think, by and large, that calm people stay calm and so forth. I said that I would get excited at every month when I was a kid, but I wouldn't have actually made a fuss about it, and that's still the way I am now."

"You think? 'Cause I was thinking, I mean, I definitely know that I wouldn't write on a freaking heart or anything as awfully corny as that, but if I knew, you know, that he would appreciate it, I don't know that I wouldn't do something to mark the occasion."

"Well, that's fine, then. You're hardly going to be called out for overblowing it if your boyfriend likes it, are you?" Janice pointed out. "And of course you're not silly enough to write on a heart. Anyone over twenty writing on a heart should just go and lie down and die," she joked. "But you know, a little card or something similar to that, that's perfectly fine. That's what Garrett and I do, and mom and dad."

"And you don't do anything unless it's been at least a year mark?"

"Yeah, pretty much. A rough estimate. Garrett and I don't know when we started dating, you know, so we just have a dinner date sometime on the month that I joined the company, even though we know that's a bit off. It was just kind of like, oh, it was about this time of year when we got together, right? But we're kind of laid back. I know of people who do anniversaries for first date, first kiss, first sex, and everything, but that's ridiculous, and those are mostly high school couples who carried on."

Yamamoto bit the inside of his cheek and nodded. It was good to have a sense of what the general adult couple did, but he was starting to feel highly embarrassed, asking questions like this when he'd never dated before. He was old enough now that his colleagues were having babies, that some of his acquaintances were on their second marriage, for chrissakes, and he'd never even dated before.

"Well, I might have to have this conversation again after I actually find someone to have anniversaries of any kind with," he said, half-smiling. "And I gotta say… not that I'm really looking, but the odds don't look too terribly good. You know… I've been at this job for just over a year now, and I like it as much as I did when I first took it. I took it because I didn't like my previous job as an engineering assistant at the research facility, of course, but," he looked away and laughed a little. "But I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was hoping the change in the people around me, meeting new people, might widen the range of my options a bit." He laughed again. "That doesn't seem to have happened, though."

"Maybe you might ask your colleagues if they can introduce you to anyone?" Janice said, trying not to show too much sympathy to avoid embarrassing her poor kid brother.

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" Yamamoto said immediately, blushing a little. "That's just kind of weird, and besides, I don't think they know me well enough to try to match me with anyone. I don't think they know I'm gay anyway."

Janice burst out laughing. "Well, how're you gonna find a boyfriend if no one even knows you're gay? One of your colleagues might be gay and even if he likes you, he wouldn't know to make a move because he'd think you were straight!"

"Well, there's just no chance to come out. I mean…it's exactly the same reason why it took me a while to come out to you and mom and dad even after I found out about me sophomore year. I knew you guys would be supportive, so there wasn't really a need to come out because I wasn't feeling any strain from being closeted, and I was away at college too. And the topic never came up! No one ever asked me about dating, or who I found sexy, or any of that. So what am I supposed to do? I'm the math teacher, not the gay math teacher."

"…You got a point," Janice conceded, "but since the default sexuality is assumed to be straight, I think it's allowable to make it known in some way that you're gay. That's not really you declaring your sexuality where it's not needed—that's just you making it known that people's assumptions about you are false."

"Still… you've never experienced it, so you don't know, but it's really super awkward. Unless some golden opportunity comes up, like when someone points to a picture and goes, "Oh, she's super sexy, whattaya think?" so that I can go, "Well, she's good-looking, but I don't find her sexy cuz I'm gay," or something like that, it's really really awkward. And even that's kinda awkward." Yamamoto started giggling out of embarrassment again. "I mean, the reason why I refused to sit mom and dad down and come out the ol' fashioned way and instead made you tell them, was because sitting them down like that and saying "I'm gay," felt a bit too much like going, "I like dick, just thought you should know"!"

Janice laughed too. "Honestly," she said through her laughter, "You're no better than all those bigots who try to make being gay all about the sex! You don't have to feel that way, you know that."

"I do, though. And either way, I think my male colleagues are all dating or engaged or married, and there's no one I would trust to introduce me to anyone anyway."

"So what're you gonna do? I mean… it'd be so great and fantastic if you find a nice guy in the workplace, but considering that you can't hop around jobs in the hopes of that happening, you gotta find a different option."

Yamamoto groaned. "I don't suppose you know anyone you could introduce me to?"

"Takeshi, all my friends are about ten years older than you. Besides, I'm not sure that any of my guy friends are gay or bi. It's just kind of the way it turned out, and even if they were, they're not good enough for my kid brother anyway," Janice said, trying to make Yamamoto smile. "Okay, so I know it's hard, and it's unfair, that you have to be a lot more active than most straight people have to be to find a date, but it's the situation you're in. Work with me here. Have you thought about online dating?"

Yamamoto groaned again. "I don't waaaant to do online dating," he moaned. He'd clearly given the matter some torturous thought. "Admittedly I've thought about it, but I changed my mind after two seconds of looking at some sample profiles."

Janice sighed. "Online dating isn't a bad thing," she insisted. "Most people do it now. I might've made an online profile if I hadn't met Garrett. And I don't know if you know Mary, but she met one of her boyfriends that way."

"And are they still together?"

"Well, they're not, but they still lasted around two years! And it's not like they ended because they met each other online."

Yamamoto shook his head firmly. "I'd like to first meet people face to face. Think of some other option."

"You're really going to have to be less inflexible about this," Janice muttered, but she dutifully tried to think of alternatives. "So asking people to introduce you is out, and online dating is out. You're obviously not going to hit on strangers on the street. Mhm. What about joining an extracurricular club? Some organization or group activity? You'll meet people that way."

"What kind of club or organization? I mean, this isn't college anymore. There aren't clubs just lying around that I can flit in and out of."

"Mhm… if we were church-goers, I'd tell you to go to church, but you work on Sundays anyway. The gym, maybe?"

"That's too shady!" Yamamoto immediately protested. "And it's so awkward! Can you imagine? I'd be eyeing some muscular dude and he'd probably be like, "Back off, fag," and I'd just be like, "Holy shit, please don't beat me up!" And then there's the whole stereotype of gay guys eye-fucking other guys in the locker room showers and I don't need any of that."

Janice frowned. "What about group exercise?"

"I'm not picking up guys at the gym," Yamamoto declared. "Think of something else."

"I don't know, some volunteer thing! You know the city you're in better than I do. I'm sure you can think of something."

"Even if I do some volunteer thing, the problem with how I'm supposed to let people know I'm gay doesn't change. And even if I manage to do that, there's no guarantee that anyone there will be gay or that they're looking."

Janice closed her eyes in frustration. "You're hopeless," she said, "And pessimistic. C'mon, we already went over how your options are limited because you're gay and how that's unfair and all that. There's nothing to do except hope and go for it." She was tired of getting all her ideas shot down, but she couldn't get too upset at him. Yamamoto had been burned badly, once, and had never recovered fully. She'd never forget how, during his senior year of college, he'd cried when she finally broke the news to him that his year and a half long crush on the straight boy from English class was never going to come to anything. He'd been terrified of showing the remotest interest in anyone not plainly gay after that, and there weren't many obviously gay people the places Yamamoto went.

"That's why I told you to try online dating! That way, you know everyone on that site is gay, and everyone knows you're gay. And it's obvious that you're all looking and available. I'm not telling you to use Grindr or anything like that. Maybe just make a profile and see what happens."

Yamamoto sighed. He knew she was right and that she was being perfectly reasonable, but it was hard to keep putting all her admittedly good ideas down when he was scared to try any of them. He couldn't yet shake the remote hope that he would just somehow meet the right guy at the right time and at the right kind of place like straight peoples seemed to always do, finding their other half at college or at work. Holding onto that hope had been fine all up until now, but now he was fast approaching thirty and couldn't wait for some miracle to happen.

"I'll figure out something, I guess," he said. He grinned and spoke lightheartedly but the thought was one that had crossed his mind more than once. "…Haha, you know how some bigots say that gay people will convert other people to homosexuality and how that's bad and everything? God, they don't know how much I wish that were true. My life would be infinitely less inconvenient. Goddammit, I wish that were true…"

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**I'm aware "Janice" isn't a Japanese name. Then again, Yamamoto doesn't have a sister at all in the KHR series. From this point on, the departure of my story from the original manga is going to be more and more apparent. Just a caveat.**

**Suggestions? (Constructive) Criticisms? Tell me your thoughts.**

******Please _comment/ message/ review._**


	5. The Game Plan

**The 5th Chapter up.**

**Enjoy.**

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Gokudera dropped his backpack onto his office desk with a muted clunk. He took out a napkin from the smaller front pocket and wiped away the light sweat that had formed on his forehead during his walk from the metro station to the college office building. The temperature in his closet-sized office was a welcoming dry coolness in contrast to the humid heat from the day still lingering outside. He crossed the room in three paces and shut the white blinds to keep the overhead light from leaking into the night.

It was half past 5, which gave him an hour and a half to prepare for his 7 o'clock night class at the local community college. He should have, as always, prepared for his class before, especially since it was a three hour long class that was held only once a week, but he never did and he never ran into any trouble for it. He'd slept in that Saturday until noon, just as usual. After waking in a kind of lethargic stupor from oversleeping, he'd spent the remainder of the day vaguely reminding himself that he needed to get his lecture ready sometime in the not too distant future. Gokudera still hadn't kicked the habit of doing everything at the last minute because it had never failed him yet—he knew his own capacity, even though he'd definitely cut it damn close a few times.

It was just a creative writing class anyway, and not even much of a class at that; more of a workshop to learn and develop writing techniques as a group. He just had to review what they were studying about allegories in fairy tales and children's stories and he would be alright. If worse came to worst and he had to fill time, he knew he could bullshit something on the spot.

Gokudera perched on the edge of the uncommonly creaky swivel chair and flipped through the stories that his class was currently discussing. As he glanced over the notes in the margins that he had written before, he recalled that the second draft of his students' attempt at writing children's literature was due today. He wondered, not without much enthusiasm, how they would fare. Almost all of his fifteen or so students were considerably older than him, in their late thirties or even early forties, and hadn't studied proper grammar and sentence structure in a good two decades or so. Their writing was clunky, awkward, a long way off from the "show, not tell" that was the theme of the class. Some of them had kids, though, grandkids even, and sometimes their perspectives surprised him. Still, Gokudera was not the type to live in hope. He would wait and see. It would take an extraordinary piece of work to convince him that anything meaningful could be conveyed simply.

Gokudera had been in his office for a little over an hour when he felt that that was quite enough reviewing to sustain him through his upcoming lecture. He got up from the edge of the desk where he'd been childishly kicking his feet in boredom while going over his papers and went for the bathroom.

He was one of the few people in the building. Almost everyone else had cleared out by 5 and now it was just him, one or two other lecturers with late night classes, the janitor, and the late-shift English department secretary.

Gokudera walked by the slivers of light coming from under the doors of the couple of other lecturers and stepped around the elderly janitor mopping the hallway. He passed the desk of the secretary on his way to the bathroom without incident, but on his way back he wasn't so lucky.

"Gokudera, it's been a while!" the secretary called to him. She was a quirky middle-aged woman not quite old enough to be his mother, but who often treated him as if she were. Every once in a while, she would chat him up in the hallway or even stop by his office to say hi, to check up on him.

He quickly swallowed the water he had his mouth from the water fountain and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Hi."

"I heard that the lecturers went out together to welcome Matt," she said, smiling and picking up her thermos as though she thought this were teatime. "How was that?"

"Oh, I couldn't make it," Gokudera replied, tilting his head and putting the tips of his fingers together delicately. He stood before her like a suspect for questioning. "I have so much work lately, you know, can't hardly keep track of anything."

"I know, I never see you anymore! You should've come by yesterday; I made snickerdoodles and brought a pan of them over and gave them out!"

"Aw, I can't believe I missed that… I'm sure they were really good, too!" Gokudera was putting on a cordial show of affection. In truth, he had no idea what snickerdoodles were except that they were a kind of cookie, but it didn't kill him to make up nice things to say on the fly. He made a point of acting exceedingly polite to those he interacted on a regular basis but whom he wasn't close to. It didn't make him any friends, which wasn't what he was going for anyway, and it importantly didn't make him any enemies—it usually succeeded in getting him to fall under the radar unless someone like this secretary, under the misconception that they were being kind to him, sought him out.

"They were! The next time I make cookies, I'll have to set aside a few for you! You're only here when it's late though, these days, so they might be all stale by then… must be tough for you to get stuck with the night class, huh? It's the latest one, isn't it?"

"I signed up for it. You know I work two jobs, and the other one's 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, so I wanted to get the latest class possible to give me time to prepare."

"Oh that's right, I'd almost forgotten, but you work at, uh, a business company, I think?"

"A loan company."

"Oh gosh, how's that? And my husband says the economy isn't doing so well these days either."

Gokudera let out a loose laugh, though he didn't relax his straight posture. He swept his bangs to the left side of his face because he wasn't sure what else to do with his hands. "I wouldn't worry too much about it," he said casually. "Everyone always says that the economy's doing badly; I mean just think, have you ever heard anyone say that the economy is doing well? And besides, it's better for my company if the economy is in recession anyway. We're mostly on individual loans, so we'd get more clients."

"That's awful!" the secretary cried, breaking into a giggle. Gokudera just shrugged.

There was a clock hanging on the wall easily within his sight, showing the time to be seven forty. Gokudera considered looking at his watch to give the secretary a hint that he was quite ready to be left alone now. He didn't necessarily mind speaking with the secretary, because he knew that she was a simpleminded soul who only meant well and that it was just her personality to be sociable, but he didn't particularly enjoy it either. It was awkward for him, with their eyes on different levels, feeling both superior and inferior to her because he was standing up and she was sitting down. He wasn't incapable of carrying on trite conversation if it was necessary, because he wasn't stupid and could figure out the right thing to say even if he didn't feel it, but he didn't care to make an effort when he had no reason to. Gokudera kept on amiable smile on his face, but started shuffling his feet a little. He felt more bored than anything else.

She had to pick the subtle signs sometime, and eventually she did. "Oh, I know you have to get to your class now," she said, as though Gokudera were a student and not the teacher, leaning back in her chair. "We have to talk more soon, okay? Come around more often and don't be a stranger!"

"Mhm." He made a noise just to show that he had heard, twitching the corners of his mouth and tilting his head as he strolled around the secretary's desk. He may have a policy of politeness, but Gokudera needed to be in a certain charitable mood to tell a white lie about promising to keep in touch or to be friendly, because knew he wouldn't be keeping that promise. He hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets as he quickly made for his office like a squirrel scampering for the safety of its burrow.

"It's an expression," the clueless secretary called after him, thinking, from his ambiguous response, that he was confused about the last part of her parting. "It means, uhm…"

"—I know what it means." His office door clicked shut behind him.

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After class, Gokudera sat in his office for his office hours. He didn't expect anyone to come—it was too early in the semester for students to come visit him just yet. Immediately after stepping into his office, he tossed his backpack against the side of the desk and turned on the school computer.

Having nothing in particular to do, he glanced over the drafts that he had just collected from his students. As he had thought, the improvement was not drastic, just as normal, but at least the most glaring errors had been successfully eradicated. Somewhat satisfied, he set the papers aside for future grading.

He turned to the computer and started checking his email. Still no email from his friends. Just like every other time he checked, and he checked whenever he had time. Gokudera didn't know why he even bothered checking his email anymore. If he had to guess, he would guess that it had been about 4 months since he heard from Ally, 3 months since from Ryan. Probably 7 or 8 months since from Winston, but he wasn't sure. He was afraid to look at the date of the last emails he got from them—he felt certain that he would get a nasty twitch at seeing their neglect of him validated. It had been a long time since he had heard from anyone—that was all he knew.

He'd stopped rereading their last emails a long time ago. It had stopped being gratifying quickly, had never been very enjoyable to start with. Maybe it was because he was the one English major out of all his friends, or maybe it was the other way around, because his friends were all maths and sciences majors, but there was a great disparity in both the length and quality of their emails to each other. Gokudera used to really pour himself out into his emails, drafting over and over and creating the kind of beautiful, complex, eloquent sentences that used to get him complimented as being a lyrical writer in school. He used to muse over little things that happened to him that made him think, or of news stories that affected him. Once upon a time, they'd responded in a more or less reciprocatory manner. But it wasn't very long at all before their emails deteriorated, and Gokudera quickly found that there was no stopping it. Despite his near pandering, cajoling flattery, and subtly jabbing jokes, the tide couldn't be turned, until he resorted to just asking questions with everything he said to manipulate them into responding with at least _something_, even if it wasn't substantial.

Even when he wanted to show that he was upset and didn't write as much or as enthusiastically as he usually did, they never picked up the hint. Their emails went right on dwindling.

Gokudera thought more and more, what's the point? They'd all promised to keep in touch and said that emailing wouldn't be a problem, but they clearly weren't able to follow through. Or didn't want to. Even when they deigned to write him, he didn't derive much pleasure from it, which made him wonder why he'd wasted time waiting. He wanted to say to them, I don't give a shit what movie you saw last last weekend and how it was kinda mediocre but okay all the same. I couldn't care less about how you haven't worked out in ages but probably should. I want to know what's going on. What the fuck's going on?

It was like they were all in some kind of collusion to ignore him, but to tease out the torture like some spineless bitch who said everything except "let's break up" while inching towards the door. Sometimes, the resentment that rose up in him was enough to get Gokudera to take to the keyboard and craft a sarcastic, cynical paragraph, saying that he completely, totally understood that they were busy and that he didn't mind, oh not all that much, when they replied late. But he never pressed send.

They were always so apologetic. They seriously didn't mean to write so late, really had no idea where all their free time went, even as they told him about the exciting vacation tour trip they'd recently and spontaneously gone on. Their tones were always so stupidly sincere. Even as Gokudera wondered whether it was all a ruse, he knew that they they weren't lying to him. He knew they meant well, so why didn't they act on that? If they were sorry, why didn't they show that? If they could meet in person, face to face, Gokudera wouldn't hesitate to slam some ultimatums down on the table and look at them through his bangs with a meaningful glare. But it was impossible to meet in person anymore, and he was scared that he would sever whatever thin strains that still maintained contact if he was firm with them and said things they might not like.

Though, quite realistically, cutting contact wouldn't be a terrible loss for him. It wouldn't be terribly different from his current state of affairs. He may as well not have friends.

The same thoughts circled around and around his head: What's happening with you guys' lives, lately? Are you happy? I know we live in different states now, that when I returned to where we went to high school together, you went to states far away that I've never been. Is it okay there? What's grad school like? I'm still planning for that for myself, you know, but it's going slow. Do you guys contact each other, if you don't contact me? …You can't be bothered to write me, but do you even think about me from time to time?

Gokudera logged out of his email account after clearing out his spam. As he clicked around on the screen with deft flicks of his wrist, he considered going to the club district again. He'd gone only yesterday, but he wasn't going to be short on money if he didn't buy alcohol. It would still mean that he would save a little less than usual that month, but he could afford to be a tiny bit less economical for once. Some things took priority, and spending a little cash on a distraction could be well worth it.

But by the time 10 o'clock came around and Gokudera started trekking back towards the subway station, he had decided against going to the club district. There was sure to be a lot of people there now, and going felt too much like he was giving up on his friends for good, even as he seriously debated whether they were still worthy of being called his "friends." And, really, going once a week was quite enough. Gokudera decided then that he would go to the club district anywhere from 2 to 4 times a month, never more and never less. Even if he couldn't find a boyfriend, at least he would be able to forget about his friends.

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**FUTURE GLIMPSE:**

He was a hurricane. Yamamoto watched him with wide eyes and a smile stretched so wide it hurt his face.

If it hadn't already been amazingly clear from the way he'd so primly asked permission from the bartender and then pushed all the tables to the side; cried for the music to be jacked up, please; and danced like he was high out of his mind when he was stone-cold sober, it became clear that this man marched to his own beat when he stopped right in the middle of a song, just as abruptly as he had started, and plopped back down at the counter. Yamamoto followed him out of the dance floor just as he had followed him in, laughing weakly, in some awe.

"Everytime I dance, I feel like I must've gotten stupider. Probably killed all my spare brain cells with the way I bang my head about." The dancing man grinned and reached for his drink, but then gave pause. "No one's messed with my drink, right?" he asked, his already soft voice made huskier from his brief but intense exertion. "They always tell you to never leave your drink by itself." He looked to the bartender, who smiled and shook his head.

"Well that's alright, then." He took the straw out of his iced tea and downed a third of the drink in a few gulps. "Besides, even if anyone was trying to drug me to date-rape me, they'd fail, since I'm going home with you." He turned his tilted head to look at Yamamoto and laughed like a toddler who'd just sprinkled water to wake a napping friend. Yamamoto laughed too, and sat next to him.

If it had been any of the other guys whom Yamamoto had come across in the bars, Yamamoto would have begun to feel uncomfortable. But this guy's laugh was so open and innocent, his flirting so unmistakably joking, almost brotherly, that no alarm bells went off. There wasn't a hint of trying to be cool, sexy, or cocky about him—if nothing else, his awful middle-school boyish dancing had proved that.

"But, uh… I don't think I know your name?" He put his iced tea down and brushed his bangs to the side. Flushed and pumped full of endorphins, he held out his hand to Yamamoto with an unusual confidence.

"Oh, I'm Yamamoto," Yamamoto told him, hurrying to shake his hand.

"Yamamoto." The man nodded to himself. "Hi Yamamoto, I'm Gokudera." He spat out his name so quickly that it was a monosyllabic blur.

"I… I'm sorry?"

"Gokudera."

"Oh. Hi Gokudera!"

"Hi." Gokudera smiled and nodded at him once in greeting before turning back away to gulp down another third of his drink.

Yamamoto felt that he should initiate conversation now, at this opportune moment. Gokudera had gone off like a firecracker, had broken the ice to watery mush with his sparking fire. Now he had to reciprocate, show that he wasn't a waste of this fascinating man's time. He hadn't gotten up the guts to talk to him first to not have a conversation.

There were many things he wanted to ask him, crucial things, like how old he was and what his job was and other significant factors that came into play when looking for a partner. But it would be beyond tactless to abruptly bring up such topics. Yamamoto said the first relevant thing that popped into his head.

"Aren't you worried about those guys back there videotaping you? They had their phones out for the entire thing."

Gokudera glanced back at the guys in the back who were still playing with their phones. "They don't know my name. I wouldn't worry about it. Just three random guys with a funny video out of a world of funny videos. I've more chance of dying in a car accident tomorrow than I have in rocketing to internet fame with that." He grinned lightly at Yamamoto. "Besides, I didn't do anything _bad_."

There was that friendly flirtation again. Yamamoto had to laugh. "Yeah, no, you were good, really good."

"I know, I should start up a dance academy right now. Call my dance move 'How to flail like an idiot with poor coordination.' You know, I actually do like dancing, I just don't do much of it, and so I get it out of my system in rare times like this," Gokudera said, gesturing to the dance floor of the bar. "I used to take a zumba class when I was in college, because there was a fitness requirement, but man, I found out damn quick that I had to drop that class for the safety of both myself and others."

"Zumba? I haven't done that, but I went to a jazzercise class once. I thought it was going to be stupid, but it was actually really hard! I got sore and everything. That was in college for me too, though, and heh, clearly my dancing skills haven't improved since then."

Gokudera was the first to bring up what was on both of their minds, now that the conversation had somewhat been led up to the topic. "Well, at least you gave it a shot. What's college for, if not that? I think everyone misses that kind of… freedom, in college, after they graduate. I know I do, and it hasn't been that long for me." He shrugged. "Four years? Haha, I still act pretty damn free, though, sometimes."

Laughing in agreement, and also in some pleasure, Yamamoto quickly considered the information Gokudera had just tossed to him. If Gokudera had been out of college for about four years, that meant that he was probably somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-eight. He was twenty-nine. Up to four years wasn't much of an age gap in any meaningful sense. He just hoped that Gokudera felt the same. "Undergraduate's very free, but grad school gets more serious, you know, you'd expect that. Not a drastic change, now that so many people are just going to grad school to bide time, but I saw a little change," Yamamoto said, hinting at a very general range of his age and showing off his level of education a little.

"Yeah?" Gokudera twisted around in his seat, clearly interested. "I want to go to grad school; am planning for it right now, actually. How far did you go?"

"Master's. Mechanical engineering," Yamamoto told him, hoping that he would be impressed.

He was. "Very, _very_ cool. And is that what you do, then?"

"Uhm, no," Yamamoto giggled, deflating a little, feeling a bit embarrassed. "I used to, up until last year, actually, but kinda wanted a change. I teach Calculus now, at an academy. A little Physics too, sometimes. Uh… what do you do?"

"I work at a loan company and teach creative writing at this community college. And it's what I majored in—double major, Economics and English."

"Oh, my sister—I have an older sister—was telling me not too long ago to take a writing class or something like that!"

"Really? Why, are you interested in writing?"

"Uh, not really, actually, but," Yamamoto stuttered, realizing a little belatedly that the reason why his sister had made the suggestion, to try to find a boyfriend, was one that he couldn't possibly admit to Gokudera. He tried to cover up as best as he could. "But she thought it might be a good idea if I got out more, you know, get out of the house and hang out with people."

"Oh okay, well that's good. Yeah, I think most of my students are mainly there to socialize. They're all kind of middle-aged people, lots of housewives, who just wanted to start up a hobby. Or at least that's what it sure seems like from the absolutely _spectacular_ quality of their writing."

Yamamoto broke into a slightly amused chortle. "It's just as well that I didn't sign up for a class, then, if there's no one my age! Uh, but say, what are your students learning right now?"

Gokudera shrugged mischievously, teasing. "I don't know, why don't you enroll in my class? 7pm on Saturdays. I'm not too bad of a teacher." He shot Yamamoto a cheeky grin.

His come-on excited Yamamoto precisely because it wasn't meant seriously. "Ah," he replied, biting his lip over a smile, "But I think the bounds of the teacher-student relationship would rather limit us."

Yamamoto was delighted to see that Gokudera was pleasantly surprised by this answer. He had surprised himself, really—he wasn't in the habit of flirting or making sexual innuendos, what with his shy-boy quiet mannerisms, but Gokudera's obviously playful nudging had freed him to nudge back.

Gokudera drew back a little in his seat and raised his eyebrows in pretty curves. "Yeah? Well…we can't have that." He suddenly tittered, like it was a cough he'd been holding in, hiding his smirk with his sleeve. "Uh, to answer your previous question," he said when he recovered, thanking his stars that what he was teaching now sounded really sophisticated, "My class just started doing ekphrasis."

Yamamoto knew, from the way that he coyly didn't explain what this "ekphrasis" was, that Gokudera wanted him to ask. He was happy to oblige. "What's that, ekphrasis?"

"It's a Greek word, a literary term," Gokudera said proudly. "It means a literary description, commentary, or interpretation of a visual work of art, though loosely it can mean anything visual, like an object or a setting."

"Oh, so like, 'the sky is blue,' like that?" Yamamoto teased.

"'F' for lack of effort," Gokudera retorted without missing a beat. "No, here, let me give you an example. I'll describe this bar." He spun around on the counter stool and faced the main of the bar, clearing his throat. "Gokudera turned to look around the bar, letting his gaze slowly sweep from left to right," he began, narrating what he was seeing. "The corners of the rectangular room were dark, untouched by the soft maroon overhead lights hanging from the ceiling. He could see three strangers on the far side, crowding together over the small table and casually chatting under the frilly lace dangling from their table's ruddy lamp. A further two strangers simply sat, quietly and by themselves, on the side, the light from their cellphones and laptops lighting their thin faces with a pale pallor. In the middle was the makeshift dance floor, its wooden boards, once buffed with busy feet, unoccupied now."

Gokudera, not done yet, shifted so that he was almost facing Yamamoto. He smiled, only very slightly, and Yamamoto noticed for the first time that he had a dimple or a crease or something next to one corner of his mouth. He hadn't noticed it before because it apparently only happened at that specific level of smile that Gokudera was directing at him now. Half-lit with the same light as Yamamoto, the dimple/ crease dipped deep into Gokudera's cheek and gave his smile a distinctly asymmetrical tinge that fascinated Yamamoto.

"At the front of the bar, directly next to Gokudera, was Yamamoto. Half-lit with the brighter and happier yellow-white light from the counter as he faced Gokudera, he leisurely sipped his red wine in the warmth of the bar. With his sleeves pulled back a little and his shirt collar loosened, he looked like…"

Gokudera trailed off, and all of a sudden, Yamamoto found his eyes locked on Gokudera's. Starting to blush, he thought he'd been caught staring at Gokudera's smile, but then just mutely watched as the other man's dark eyes lowered and scanned slowly down his chest. Yamamoto nervously studied his face for a reaction, holding his breath and clenching his abs, feeling the heady heat inside the bar. Gokudera held his small coy smile, but the corners of his mouth seemed to pull tighter, making the small dent in his face cut in deeper. Yamamoto couldn't help but feel that this playful boy knew exactly what he was doing to him, and wasn't sure how he felt about it. The smooth swell of Gokudera's bottom lip was a striking contrast with his sharp chin, which raised slowly as he brought his black eyes back up.

"… like he might want to redo a button," he finished, snickering and making the curious dip in his face disappear. He nodded at a wayward button on Yamamoto's shirt that had slipped out of the buttonhole.

Yamamoto broke into quick breathy gasps of laughter, in a rush of joy and pleasure and absolute relief, gripping the edge of the counter a handspan away from Gokudera's arm. He redid the button with slightly trembling hands, looking away from Gokudera shyly. "Thanks," he said softly, through his giggles.

Gokudera shook his head, smirked wonderfully, and rotated all the way around his seat to his original position facing the counter. He'd taken a risk, but it had turned out just as he had hoped. He'd played his game well—now the challenge was to make it last.

/

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After a good bit more conversation during which they continued teasing and learning basic facts about each other, one of the men in the bar got up, packed up his things, paid the bill, and left. Gokudera and Yamamoto glanced at him leaving and braced themselves against the quick rush of cold that was sure to follow from the door opening into the windy winter cold outside.

"Thanks, this was _Stevie's Corner_. Please come again!" called the bartender after him.

Seeing the man leave suddenly reminded Yamamoto that he had been in _Stevie's Corner_ for quite a long time. He'd only really come to have a quick glass of wine after a less than excellent day at the academy, but then had run across Gokudera. It was Friday night; he had class bright and early tomorrow. If Gokudera wasn't right there, he could get out his phone and check the time, but he didn't want to be rude and he definitely didn't want to give Gokudera the wrong impression that he wasn't interested in him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a silver glint coming from Gokudera's wrist—the edge of a watch face. While still participating in the conversation, he tried to catch a glimpse of what general hour it was.

Gokudera didn't notice that Yamamoto was futilely trying to read the time off his watch, but he noticed that Yamamoto was very slightly not as into the conversation as he was before. He glanced at his watch, the face of which was luckily turned towards him. It was a little after 9. He'd been with Yamamoto at the bar for a little over an hour, a marvelous achievement.

As marvelous as it was being in the bar with Yamamoto, though, it was past his dinnertime. He wanted, badly, to eat dinner with this very nice guy who was really quite a catch, but was wary of going all out all at once. It was apparent enough that Yamamoto was far from being a one-night-stand kind of guy, and also that he wasn't a sex-on-the-first-date kind of guy either. He surely would be put off by anyone who didn't want to take it slow. No matter how well or politely Gokudera meant it, if he suggested that they go eat dinner, Yamamoto might think that he was just trying to get into his pants. Furthermore, Gokudera wasn't sure that he could keep up the level of conversation that he'd been maintaining; he was starting to be exhausted what with trying to be witty all the time. It looked like Yamamoto was just beginning to get bored, too—it was better to end this first encounter on a sure high note than to hang onto it and hope that the warm glow would last.

Gokudera fidgeted on his seat. "This is totally random, but these stools aren't the most comfortable things in the world," he said abruptly, during a pause in the conversation in between topics.

"Haha, yeah, you're right. Uhm...do you want to sit at the tables?" Yamamoto asked, swiveling around in his seat. "The benches there have more cushioning."

"I'm not sure that would help much," Gokudera said slowly, tapping his heel on the metal pillar of his bar stool.

Gokudera had been seated, throughout the conversation, so that he was angled slightly towards the door of the bar, but Yamamoto felt for the first time now that he was looking at the door instead of just facing it. The sudden small splinter of anxiety that he was losing Gokudera's interest entered him.

After a little internal debate, watching Gokudera adjusting himself on his stool in threatening movements highly suggestive of leaving his seat altogether, Yamamoto spoke. "We…might change locations," he suggested, as casually as he could, though he wished that he still had some wine left over to sip. "It's about dinnertime… isn't it?"

He breathed again when Gokudera gave him a warm smile. "That sounds like an awesome idea," he said kindly, "And I'd love to have dinner with you. But both of us have work tomorrow and I live kinda far away from here." He pulled back his sleeve and checked his watch in an meaningful gesture. "It's pretty late, almost 9:20," he informed Yamamoto, and decisively hopped off his stool.

Yamamoto slid off his stool as well and put on the shoulder strap of his briefcase as Gokudera slung his backpack on. They paid for their drinks and left _Stevie's Corner_ together.

As they walked towards the nearest opening of the main alley, with their hands deep in their coat pockets to shield against the cold, Yamamoto felt his phone inside his pocket and wondered how he might get Gokudera's contact. He didn't want to ask for Gokudera's number—he was too shy for that, but it would kill him to watch Gokudera just walk away. He desperately wished that Gokudera would ask him for his number. But Gokudera, his face half-covered with a dark grey scarf and his hands buried deep into his own otherwise empty coat pockets, didn't show any inclination of getting out his phone anytime soon.

They left the gay bar alley and started walking along the outer outline of the general clubbing district. Yamamoto saw how the public bus stop that he was bound for wasn't at all far away and got more worried than ever. They were walking in silence now, because of the overpowering cold, and he couldn't help but feel that it would be terribly awkward, and that he would look petty and common, if he were to break this silence by asking for Gokudera's number. But what could he do? From the way that Gokudera's gaze stretched far, over the heads of the waning rush hour crowd to the end of the road where the Metro station was, he was clearly taking the Metro. If he could, Yamamoto would go with him, but he was hopeless finding his way about the complex criss-crossing lines of the Metro and was scared that Gokudera might think he was following him home. The bus stop was only meters away now and there was only so much Yamamoto could do by dragging his feet.

He slowed his pace as much as possible, but then just stopped helplessly, feeling like a complete fool, when they reached the bus stop. Gokudera took a few more paces without him, then realized that Yamamoto wasn't by his side and turned.

He pulled down his scarf. "Oh, you take the bus," he said, seeing Yamamoto standing awkwardly on the periphery of the crowd waiting at the bus stop. "I thought you took the Metro. I take the Metro."

"Yeah, I take the bus," Yamamoto told him, apologetically. "I don't know how to find my way around the Metro, unfortunately."

"Oh, well, I'll have to teach you sometime. It's dead simple—I've been doing it since I was a kid. Anyway, uhm... hey, you go to _Stevie's Corner_ often?"

"Often enough," Yamamoto replied, feeling the corners of his mouth pull up as if Gokudera was tugging at the strings, feeling a spurt of hope burst inside him. He had no idea what Gokudera's definition of "often" was, and so was being purposely vague. As far he was concerned, Gokudera's "often" was his "often."

"Cool, well, you think you can make it next week? Same time, Friday at 8?"

"Yeah, I can make it," promised Yamamoto, trying to contain his idiot smile. "Friday at 8!"

"Alright, see you then!" Gokudera grinned and walked up close to him. Yamamoto had a moment of panic, thinking he was going to be kissed, but Gokudera simply rubbed his shoulder at arms length, his friendly touch firm enough to be clearly felt through Yamamoto's thick winter coat. "Don't forget, alright?" He laughed gleefully enough to draw some curious looks from passersby, returned his hand to his pocket, and turned and then was lost in the crowd.

/

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**Next chapter, the 6th, will return to all real-time, but Future Glimpses will be occurring fairly regularly.**

**What did you think of this chapter? Particularly the characterization/ backstory and the Future Glimpse?**

**Please ****_comment/ message/ review!_**


	6. Teaser

**Ah... So sorry that I haven't updated in a while.**

**Unfortunately, it will only get worse before it gets better. I am going to enter Finals period in a week or so and have no time to fuck about. I will update when Finals are over, which won't be for a good few weeks.**

**Below is a snippet of what may or may not be in the next real chapter. I haven't fully decided what will happen next.**

**Again, sorry for my tardiness, and I hope you like this teaser.**

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**FUTURE GLIMPSE:**

He looked at the caller ID with a smile before he picked up the phone. "Mom?"

"Takeshi! How's my baby doing?" She was on speaker. "Hey kid!" came his dad's voice as well, crackling a little in static.

"Mom, dad," Yamamoto replied, laughing at their unwarranted enthusiasm at hearing his voice. They called every three weeks or so but reacted every time like they hadn't spoken in years. It was due to a combination of him being their youngest and them being empty-nesters. "How've you been?"

"Oh, just the same as ever, you know! Your dad's going through a Stanley Kubrick fad these days, but besides suffering through those movies, we've been just great," his mom told him, ignoring her husband's protests that Kubrick was a historical director. "But what about you? The summer term just ended, right?"

"Mhm hmm. I'm in fall term now. Things have calmed down a bit during the five-day week but my weekends are busier. Oh, and I gave up teaching Physics and I teach all Calc now."

"That's real smart, real smart," his dad said. "Much less confusing that way, right? You can focus on one subject now, that's good!"

Yamamoto could have probably said that he was quitting maths and sciences altogether and was teaching history, or art, and still have gotten the same supportive response from his parents.

"Yeah, you can organize yourself much easier now," his mother chimed in. "That was a good move!"

"Well, it wasn't actually my decision really," Yamamoto stammered. "It was just kind of like my boss said that there wasn't much of a demand for Physics at the moment, so I ended up taking all Calc. But yeah, the class planning's better for me now."

"Oh, well, then it turned out perfect for you then!" Nothing could get his parents' spirits down. They were determined to be overwhelmingly chipper. "And your classes are all going well?"

"Yeah, it's going good."

"Good, good!" his mom practically cheered. "Of course he's doing good," his dad said, sounding affronted at the very suggestion that anybody might think anything less of his son. "You're not too overworked on the weekends, though?"

"No, no, it's just a bit busier than usual," Yamamoto reassured them. He could have been so overworked that he would collapse into a coma at the end of every weekend and still told them that he was just fine. He knew his parents cared about him to a ridiculous extent and didn't want to worry them.

"You should really go and do something fun with the spare time you have now! You know, maybe go out with friends or something like that, eh? Ooh, that reminds me! But Janice told us the other day that you're looking for a boyfriend!"

"Janice _told_ you that?" Yamamoto yelped, blushing.

"Of course she told us, sweetie! She said—"

"—It's not her business to tell you stuff like that! I'm going to talk to her!"

"Don't blame Janice, Takeshi. It's her bound duty as your older sister to tell us stuff like this! She was very excited, too, when she told us, and so are we! Have you met anybody nice yet?"

"I haven't even started looking yet!" Yamamoto exclaimed, making a mental note in his head to chew his sister out the next time he talked to her. "Jeez, I only just started thinking that maybe a boyfriend would be nice and I've got the whole family jumping down my throat!"

"Alright, alright, calm down," his dad said. "Look, we just think it's great that you're looking for a date. I mean, now or never, right? Now's a good time to start thinking about this kind of thing, especially now that you've got a nice stable job and your own apartment. There aren't that many guys your age this settled or this, this accomplished, you know? You're going to be a hot commodity, kiddo!"

"Your dad's right," Yamamoto's mom added. "Now's a good time. You know, the average age of marriage is 29, 30, 31, thereabouts now."

"Whoa whoa whoa," Yamamoto said. "Marriage? I haven't even got a date yet!"

"Well, you will," his parents said, with all the confidence that Yamamoto lacked. "Hey, by the way, how do you plan on meeting other boys?"

"I don't! Or I haven't got one yet. I'm still thinking. And besides… even if I had a date and found someone to marry, I wouldn't be able to get married anyway. Not in this State."

The State Yamamoto was in at present didn't have marriage equality. "Oh, well…that's no great matter," his mom brushed off after a tiny awkward pause, refusing to let her spirits be dampened. "Of course you'll have to get married here, in your home State, since you're going to settle down here."

Yamamoto had to laugh at her leaving him no choice whatsoever in the issue. He was a tiny bit annoyed at how his parents insisted that he live near them in their home state, but in truth, that was what he had planned for himself. "Well, like I said, I haven't even met anyone yet. And there's no guarantee that I'll meet anyone anytime soon. And either way, no one's getting married anytime soon!"

"Who's going to give me grandkids, then? Janice doesn't want kids, so it's gotta be you!"

Yamamoto groaned. "I don't think you understand how being gay works, mom!"

Yamamoto's dad snickered. "Alright, let's stop teasing him," he said to Yamamoto's mom. "Takeshi, there's no rush. We just want you to know that we're right here supporting you, okay? Just let us know if you meet any nice boys and we'll give you advice or something."

"Uhm…okay," Yamamoto said, with absolutely no intention of ever asking his parents anything remotely about relationship advice.

His parents laughed at his awkward response and changed the conversation topic to relieve him, asking if he'd Skyped with his old friends lately and whether the weather where he was had cooled down any from the summer heat wave. Yamamoto, grateful at being let off the hot seat, easily answered their friendly questions and asked them in his turn if they were managing their patients alright and whether Ally, the house cat, had gotten over her summer cold.

"...Well, I gotta start preparing for tomorrow's class," Yamamoto said finally, when their chat had died down somewhat.

"Oh yeah, yeah, of course," they said. "Ooh, look at the time, we didn't mean for this call to go on so long! Go and get ready for your class and call us whenever you have some free time, okay?"

"Yeah, alright," Yamamoto promised. "Have a good—"

"—And oh, keep us updated on the boys you meet!"

Yamamoto closed his eyes and groaned again. "Don't bet on it," he said dryly, through his parents' giggles. "Good night, and talk to you later. Love you."

He hung up with a smile on his lips, but that smile quickly died as he went back to his computer. His parents were right. It was now or never if he wanted a boyfriend. And though he had protested against his mother's talk of marriage and kids, both of those were things that he very much wanted, that he definitely had in mind for the long term.

The trouble remained, however, as to how he was going to find someone suitable.

/

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**Gokudera will be (most likely) back in the club district in the next chapter. As I mentioned before, he acts differently with different people, and this is going to show.**

**There also may or may not be another significant Future Glimpse, though I haven't decided yet whether this will be with Gokudera and Yamamoto together. The time narrative is going to get a little crazy from here on out.**

**Hope you'll have a little patience and stick with me :]**

**Please ****_comment/ message/ review!_**


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